Somerset House has become a great place to see intersectional art shows on urgent social subjects of our times, and the latest is Soil: The World At Our Feet, newly opened this week and running until April, a landmark exhibition on the wonder of the earth as a vessel and bond to our ecosystem and the future of the planet.
The exhibition brings together a cross-section of approaches and stories from not only artists, but writers and scientists too. You can expect more than fifty dazzling sensory artworks, stimulating objects and artefacts and plenty of documentation and science about soil, a site representing nature’s power and precarity, artistic germination and social innovation, all at once. We’re especially excited to see Collective Marshmallow Laser Feast’s never before seen multimedia work, Poetics of Soil, revealing the hidden kingdoms of life underground.
Co-curated by The Land Gardeners, Henrietta Courtauld and Bridget Elworthy; curator and writer May Rosenthal Sloan and Claire Catterall, Senior Curator at Somerset House, the team says: “We need to start thinking of soil as something more than just dirt. It is part of a vast range of processes without which human life would not be possible. Only in the last few years have scientists really begun to unlock the secrets of soil, and there is still so much to be discovered.”
